


Souvenir

by VillainIHaveDoneThyMother



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Bad Beginning Bad Ending, Corpse Display, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Horde Prime POV, Horde Prime Wins, Horrible Pseudo-Colonialist Strikes Again, Rape/Non-con Elements, Religious Fanaticism, So Fundamentally Oily, bad concept
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:46:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24534823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VillainIHaveDoneThyMother/pseuds/VillainIHaveDoneThyMother
Summary: In a side room off his trophy hall Horde Prime keeps the princess, last relic of Etheria.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra), Entrapta/Horde Prime (She-Ra)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 130





	Souvenir

**Author's Note:**

> she-Ra season five is great and gave me everything I wanted in terms of girls kissing and destroying the sources of their religious trauma. unfortunately the second I saw horde prime dragging entrapta around by her hair something within me snapped and decided some Bad Fic needed to be written. 
> 
> endless apologies.

In a side-room off his trophy hall Horde Prime keeps the last Etherian in the galaxy. 

Such a shame he didn’t get a chance to pick a proper memorial to the world which gave him its Heart. Etheria burned to bring the galaxy into Prime’s light and all that’s left of it is a mouthy woman who keeps trying to take apart her cell for spare parts.

Every time Prime visits his cabinet of curiosities the rebel is up to some new tricks. She peels the siding off the walls and tries to hack into the ship, she produces circuitry from her tangle of hair, she plays with her food and throws furious platitudes about rebellion and hope his way. If he wasn’t in a good mood he’d dispose of her. Luckily for her, planetary uprisings are falling every day and he’s inclined to keep this prize alive. Even her spirit is allowed to stay unbroken, her body unchipped (it helps that the wispy hairs at the nape of her neck take apart circuitry seemingly on instinct). Etheria was a challenge so the memento taken from it must be challenging. 

Even broken by the death of all she’s known, she proves engaging. He’s not one to be amused by defiance and errant minds. Entrapta, once a Princess of Etheria, is sharp though. Grieving, though she may be, she’s constantly curious. 

“Your neural network, are you just another node off of it?” she demands through the clear force field as Horde Prime tries to relax and take in his victories. “Or are you something more, a moving part of the code?”

When he lets he out she first tries to strangle him with her hair. After that tantrum is finished, she plasters herself to the window and watches the stars.

“I always wanted to go to space,” she says, more to herself than Prime, who is deadheading the last ananke lily in the galaxy. 

There is something in his stolen memories of her, something hungry and unclean. He cannot quite grasp it yet. It comes to him in dreams of red eyes and chirpy smiles, skin on his, a heat never quite consummated. Impossible sacrilege that’s always misty when he wakes. Perhaps that’s why he spares her. 

Perhaps he is simply tired of forgetting all the foes he has faced. 

Peace can’t last forever. Soon she is back to making trouble, trying to impale her guard with a broken chair leg. Her hair which she once used to toss a little brother half way across the room, really is a nuisance. It would be better to cut it. 

That seems like a marring of his trophy though, a distortion of what she was originally, so he leaves it be. Rather than come down hard on this wayward prisoner-pet, he allows her more socialization with his brothers. Most unenlightened souls suffer without contact. It’s a tool he’s used in the past to break recalcitrant princes and presidents, but he’d much rather she stay sane (though he isn’t sure why). She seems to thrive in the company of the clones, especially now that she’s been suitably reprimanded for giving them names. 

One of them, the fallaway, the defect brought back into the light and granted his presence once more, particularly takes to her. Prime knows all so Prime knows when his Little Brother, whose darkening hair and heavy circled eyes were entertaining before the rot at his center became clear, whose body will not last another six decades at this rate, rearranges the schedules to spend more time with the last survivor of Etheria. This one has always been resistant to reading so he doesn’t know the exact moment they first touch, first kiss, first whisper words of treason and adoration. 

In the long years of his life he has seen many fools who think the flesh is love, so he can estimate. 

He lets the little charade play out for a while. The two of them, isolated in a clear cage on his flagship, are no threat to the purity of the Horde. Prime is patient and forgiving, and he knows there is a place for every misshapen piece. If they are here to enrich his days, so be it. 

When they get it in their foolish, selfish little heads to escape, then he steps in. 

It’s almost too late. Entrapta’s infiltration of the ship’s systems is more thorough than than he anticipated. Amid the blaring alarms and slamming security doors it’s difficult to catch the thread of his traitorous brother’s mind. He’s corrupted away from the oneness and light, unrighteous feelings and dissonant emotions clogging the once-pure pathways of his thoughts. When they’re caught in the ship bay by a battalion of still-loyal brothers, the moment of stillness is finally enough for Prime to force his way in. 

The first thing he sees in the assumed body is the face of the princess, staring up at him in horror. Her hand is on his arm, tendrils of her hair wrap around him like a cocoon. She is afraid and he is glad. 

“Ah, little brother. How easily you have been turned, and for what?”

Though she struggles, it is dampened by her fear of hurting the creature he possesses. It’s too easy to catch fistfuls of her hair until he’s holding the writhing mass of it in one hand. It’s too easy to pull.

Flanked by brothers, Prime drags her by the hair back to her cell. He smashes the piecemeal instruments she used to hack control of his ship away from him, and makes a note to tighten his security. Bothersome though she is, Entrapta is a useful exercise in vigilance, a good excuse to update old systems. All things have their place. 

Her place right now is beneath him, squirming as he pins her to her narrow bed. They’re alone now, other brothers dismissed and door barred, and he’s contemplating the best way to make them regret their tantrum. 

Ah, but he knows what he wants. Pain is cleansing and this will make them hurt. 

Still wearing his disloyal brother’s skin he twists his fistful of hair tight until it’s pulled against her scalp, until he can cradle the back of her fragile skull and pin her wriggling hair at the same time. She gasps in pain and punches him in the face. The blow is strong but not nearly strong enough to make one sculpted (inexpertly) in his image flinch. 

There will be bruises and pain later, for this body is weak, but he doesn’t care.

“Let him go!” she shouts and he leans closer. 

“Why should I? He’s mine, and so are you.”

Then he kisses her, an unkind kiss, a kiss that drags across her pressed tight lips and drinks in her muffled cries of pain. How long has it been since he’s kissed? Too long. It’s a luxury he rarely indulges in, the flesh being unruly and lesser beings unreliable. Still, it serves a purpose. It can be enjoyable, like fine food from a broken planet or the adoration of the masses. 

This is not his usual way of seeking comfort, not some wide-eyed worshiper. She bites and struggles while somewhere deep in his head his ungrateful brother rails with undeserved pride.

When he breaks away she’s panting. “You’re a monster,” she tells him, voice cracking. 

Prime tilts his head and yanks her up to face him, so they’re sitting knee to knee. “Ah, but beloved, isn’t this what you wanted? To be loved by one of Prime’s own? You cannot have one of us without the other. He was never your sweetheart, he was always just a piece of me.”

Entrapta’s face coagulates into determination. “You’re wrong, you don’t know Hordak.”

“No,” Prime agrees, running his free hand over the curve of her collarbone. “He is so much less than I am. But I am magnanimous so I will try to understand what he saw in you.”

He pulls her into another kiss, kneads the soft curve of her flesh. Every noise of pain and betrayal is like a new delicacy offered to him. Every inch of skin unbared is a delight. 

This is their penance. That is is a joy to him is only right, for does he not adore justice?

There is only so much that can be done in a body like this. His clones are limited in their capacities and this one is especially weak. Still, he tries his best to take Etheria’s last daughter apart. Like he took her planet apart, like he has unmade a thousand planets unto the brink of his memory. 

Did he hurt the last of the First Ones like this? He knows he triumphed, knows he hated them and took pleasure in their subjugation and (almost, the girl Adora and her progenitors survived) extinction. The exact details of their demise are unclear, however. 

He has forgotten a thousand names. Mara, Veena, D’vann, Ro, all once clear as crystal, now empty records stored in withered skulls. Many more like them lost forever. In time the rest of Etheria will be forgotten as well. 

It’s why he keeps trophies, why he records and remembers. What would a world of light be without the recollection of darkness? What is a templar without an enemy?

This moment, surely he’ll remember. The desperate tears in the eyes of this would-be rebel. Biting down on soft skin and drawing blood as sweet as the fruits of long dead Tundaria. The empty fury of his wayward brother. 

When it is done he summons a guard and leaves them both to stew in misery in their cell, locked behind an opaque forcefield. There is work to be done and Prime can’t spend the whole day helping two hopeless cases see the truth. 

He is inclined to visit them again, now that he knows how enjoyable their company can be. They are both such short-lived, desperate creatures, full of base desires and delusions.

Curiosities, yes, but ones to be pitied all the same. 

In a side-room off his trophy hall Horde Prime keeps two corpses. 

They’re well mummified, of course, locked in an airless room, visible through a clear forcefield. Decay doesn’t touch them. The features of a clone, a defective suffering from the K-1982 gene variation based on the dark blue roots of his hair, and a young woman are still clear. She had a soft sort of face, hollowed in death, and almost as much purple hair as she did flesh. Prime sometimes thinks he recognizes something about her features. 

They are curled, together in death, in a narrow bed, the gleam of a mulberry gemstone almost visible between their clasped hands. The little plaque by their ~~cell~~ ~~bedroom~~ tomb says she was the last survivor of a planet called Etheria. It says nothing about him. 

He knows the name Etheria. Their sacrifice brought to him his greatest weapon, brought the galaxy a new millennium of peace. He doesn’t know why this Etherian lived while her planet perished in cleansing flames. He doesn’t know why he remembers, in flashes sometimes, her living, sobbing face. 

Even his old bodies aren’t much help. So many memories decay in unused brains. All he gleans from the floating shell of who he once was is short glimpses of a woman pressed up against a window, staring at space, of a clone whose temerity made him laugh, of a fistful of purple hair struggling to escape his grasp. 

Horde Prime only preserves the most precious things, so he reasons she must have once been precious. He only keeps what people most loved, so he knows she must have been. (Perhaps his clone, broken though he clearly was, was loved too, by some soft-hearted former self.)

Aside from that, it’s empty. 

He could get rid of the bodies. They are a strange outlier in his curated collection of grand treasures and sole surviving specimens. 

They stay, for the sake of sentiment, for the memories he cannot hold. 


End file.
